56 been made weeks before, while on my journalistic travels I was being up- lifted by my own vision of romance, the product of the writing, coming at the end of a vocation that had lasted twenty years. I had been briefly in N ew York twice since 1950, the year of myover- night stay. But the city I saw on those later occasions had remained quite sep- arate from the first city, the city of Raimu and "Marius" and "South Wind" and the gray, seemingly cano- pied sky. It was only now, in a time of anxiety that was like the anxiety of my first arrival, that I thought to look for that city. It was only now that I could begin to acknowledge the humiliation the taxi-driver had caused me when he cheated 'me, the humiliation I had felt at not being able to tip the Negro in the hotel. I remembered the name of the ho- tel: the Wellington. I remembered its writing paper, on which for the sake of drama I had written my diary on the night of my arrival. On this writ- ing paper, the letters that spelled out the name of the hotel sloped backward, next to a drawing of what I supposed was the hotel building. Did the hotel stil1 exist? My friend Robert Silvers, who had run my articles on St. Kitts and Anguilla in his paper, the New York Review of Books, said, "It's a hotel where musicians stay." And yet it was astonishing to me to come upon it one day, a working hotel on a busy street. It should have been an archeological site, to match its mythical nature in my mind. So mod- est at pavement level, in spite of the drawing of the skyscraper on the writ- ing paper. Door, lobby-none of these things I had remembered. The hotel had lived in my imagination, rather than memory, like something from earliest childhood. An impression of darkness all around-I had arrived early in the morning, and had been very tired, and nervous. And, within that darkness, sensations rather than pictures: eating the chicken over the wastepaper basket, avoiding the scald- ing water in the shower cubicle Like dreams rather than memories, and yet suited to the occasion for me: for on that day space and time had become one. Both space and time separated me from my past at the end of that day; and the writer's journey that began that day had not ended. There was no advance, but I stuck to my plan. I spent my own money. It was like watching myself bleed. Eventually, I moved away, west. And in Victoria, British Columbia, in a brand-new rented flat with rented furniture, I started work again. The writer's life: whatever one's mood, it was always necessary to pick oneself up and start again. I started on a sequence about free- dom and loss. The idea had come to me more than three years before, in East Africa. It had come suddenly, during the afternoon of a daylong drive between Nairobi, in Kenya, and Kampala, in Uganda. It had come as a mischievous, comic idea, matching the landscape and exhilaration of the long drives I had been used to making in that part of Africa. Now the idea was all that I had at the moment in the way of writer's capital, and it was touched with the mood of the histori- cal book I had written; my disappoint- ment; and the homelessness, the drift- ing about, I had imposed on myself. I had, as it were (and as had happened often before), become one of my own characters. After some weeks, I came to the end of my original impulse, and could go no farther with the writing. I lost faith in what I was doing. The days in Victoria, which had passed easily when I was writing, began to drag. And then I faced the simple fact that as a man who made his living by writing in English and had no Ameri- can audience I had only England to go back to; that my wish to be free of the English heaviness had failed; that my departure from my island in 1950- with all that it implied of homelessness and drift and longing-was final. From Victoria to Vancouver: the very tall stewardesses in the very short skirts-a dreadful frivolity. Toronto, London: the grind and grind of the airplane engines, hour after hour- stages in a return I didn't want. So twenty years on I was making a jour- ney that mimicked my first. If twenty years before I could have been granted a glimpse of myself as a writer, some- one with a talent that had been devel- oped, and with books to his name, I ___CII/// ,r -------- r it "-- 1ftr. 1>> -- --... if I" ' 11 1ft 1' 7'(f ff \ / ltd,Ù;!i'; I,' (. Ij'J! 0' ./, I t \ /r.'L ,II, . I ) .ø ------= \ : (. t //- /' '-. -... \'-== ' - )1 AUGUST 11, 1986 would have considered myself blessed. The blessing I felt as a blessing still; but-as with the pain that attends love -the disappointment that had come with the blessing I felt as a terrible solitude. I HAD no house In London, I rented a service flat in Dolphin Square. It consumed my money in steady installments, every week so much. The bills came up in a woman's handwriting: round, easy, the lower line of the writing creating a regular, almost scalloped pattern. The hand- writing spoke of a woman absolutely at peace, sexually fulfilled, without anxiety. I envied her this calm, this absence of ambition. And when I went down to the office to settle the bill I tried to work out which of the women it was, among the clerks who might have passed as wage slaves-which woman it was who, perhaps without knowing how blessed she was, had written out the figures of the fierce, debilitating demand. The summer was over. For the first time in England, after nearly twenty years, I felt cold, imperfectly clad. Until this time, I had had the same kind of clothes summer and winter and had not felt the need for a pullover or for warm underclothes, or even for an overcoat. I had longed for frosty weather, short days, electric lights in the early afternoon. Now, with this need for warm clothes, a need that seemed to grow and grow, I felt the winter as winter, darkness. One day, there were workmen somewhere below my window. They began to talk to one another. It was like listening to a play: different voices, careful dialogue, characters, sentences, ideas-showing off, acting, style. In all my time in England, I had never heard workmen talk like that, among themselves, so loudly, in the open air, for so long. It was a little frightening, this eavesdropping on what was like an unknown country. I knew another side of England: Ox- ford, people in broadcasting, writers. I had never been brought into contact like this with the country I had been living in for so long. I hadn't read about workingmen like the ones I was now listening to; I hadn't seen films about them. I went eventually to stay in a private house in the town of Gloucester. It was a wet day. The railway station was cold, damp, indicating the near- ness of the River Severn. Gloucester, away from its grand cathedral, was a